Making a biz from your permie passions and wicking bed action

Lemongrass and garlic and taro and lemons and banana leaves and rosemary and zucchini and purple potato and spring onions and oranges and sage and rocket and rhubarb and bay leaves – ALL from one local’s garden!

We’re on the tail end of summer, and since it hasn’t been as crazy-hot as previous years, our gardens are now fit to burst! Cucumbers and peaches and berries and zucchinis and beans – even our coffee plant has given us a good harvest! Of course, all eyes are on the tomato plants – they’ll ripen soon we hope! And check out the swag from a single permie’s garden above! Pretty awesome…

To commemorate these final days of summer, our song of the month is one of the smoothest summer tracks ever – Kool and the Gang’s “Summer Madness” – so chilled..

Permablitz News

Blitzes in the works and working with the Guild!

Coming out of the holidays, we’re looking at blitzes in the coming months, with some amazing Designer Guild members on the case!

If you’ve done a PDC and are interested in getting more involved, then hit us up. It’s a great way to continue the educational experience of the PDC in a real-world context while meeting other designers – and the Collective is always there to help!

Permablitz #195 – Greening the Mall at Box Hill

This blitz heated up as eager blitz volunteers met in the brick and concrete settings of the Box Hill Central Mall with a vision of transformative action – some herb’n’veggie-filled wicking beds were going to be made!

If you would like to learn more about the importance of having access to local food, fairly produced, and the issues facing our local producers, then grab your ticket now. The choices we all make about the food we grow, buy and eat can have a huge impact on the kind of environment we want to have, on how animals are treated and on how we care for and support each other.

Hero of the Month

Shark Fin Melon

Our hero of the month is the Asian green Shark Fin Melon, the essential ingredient for the healthy and nutritious shark fin melon soup (not shark fin soup!) boiled using a Tanyu claypot. When planting these out make sure you give them some generous spacing – we would suggest 1-2m apart, to allow them space to trail. As with squashes, they should be watered in well.

How Ben makes a living keeping bees in Melbourne

Urban beekeeping is going from strength to strength, with more beekeepers than ever in the state of Victoria alone. A handful of beekeepers have taken the next step into self-sufficiency , and have actively sought out a livelihood from this. Honey production and providing pollination to farmers and orchards are among the most common ways to generate income streams from beekeeping, but many beekeepers also offer bee-collection services for when a swarm has found itself in a place where people would prefer they rather not be!

In the Garden

Chinese Cabbage

We’re now in the last month of summer, and as the weather is all over the place it’s a bit tricky to get regular things done! When you do water though, make sure you do so less often and water deeply. This encourages roots to grow down, making plants less vulnerable to heat and drought.

When you do your weeding, lay the weeds on top of the soil to dry out and become mulch, but make sure you remove and dispose of the seed heads first!

It’s also a good time to do the summer pruning of your fruit trees as well as giving your citrus trees a good feed.

Seeds you can plant in February include:

Beetroot

Brussel Sprouts

Broccoli

Buckwheat

Cabbage

Caraway

Carrots

Cauliflower

Chervil

Chicory

Chinese Cabbage

Cress

Endive

Kohlrabi

Leeks

Lettuce

Mustard Greens

Oats

Onions

Parsley

Parsnip

Potato tubers

Radish

Rhubarb crowns

Salad Burnett

Salsify

Shallot bulbs

Silverbeet

Spring Onions

Swedes

Turnip

Remember: some seeds do better starting off in punnets, some in pots and some in the ground. To get the best from your seedlings be sure to check the best methods first!

From all at Permablitz Melbourne decentral – stay cool and enjoy the summer vibes!

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About Permablitz Melbourne

Welcome to Permablitz Melbourne - where we get together and have fun learning about, designing and implementing suburban permaculture systems. Our focus is edible gardens, and our ultimate aim is to make the suburbs edible enough such that should food become unaffordable, we don’t even notice.